Learning a guitar from scratch?

[dave_c]

Is it possible teach myself to play ascoustic guitar for casual and leisurly purposes? If so any book (or any media for that matter) recommendations?

[Tweed]

You can teach yourself. There are plenty of sites that will give you chords/tabs of songs. Try this one

http://chordfind.com/

[AndrewHunt]

It's very possible!

The classic book is 'Play in a Day' by Bert Weedon but that's a bit outdated now.  You can also find information on the net.

I guess the first step is to get a guitar and get used to it.  Learn how to tune it etc.  then you need to learn the basic chords.  E, A, D, C and G are the easiest.  There will be hundreds of books that teach you this and you can play hundreds of songs with these chords.

If you don't read music then you can use tabliture or TAB.  This basically is 6 lines representing the strings (starting with the thickest one at the top) and numbers representing the where you need to put your fingers.  for instance 0 is an open string, 3 is the third fret etc.  here's the E chord in TAB:

|--0-----------|
|--2-----------|
|--2-----------|
|--1-----------|
|--0-----------|
|--0-----------|

Hope this helps.  Good luck and enjoy it.  It becomes very rewarding if you keep at it.